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1
My first recollection of the film industry in British Columbia dates from
, when my friend Gord Darby invited me to attend the Vancouver pre-
mier of a film in which he claimed to have played a central role. Gord is
-foot- and played college basketball. As he tells it, he received a phone call
at home one evening from a film producer, whose first words were, “I hear
you’re tall.” Gord was thus recruited to wear the large and cumbersome cos-
tume of the monster in the John Frankenheimer horror movie Prophecy,
which was shooting some scenes in North Vancouver. We laughed all the way
through this ridiculous film – until the end, that is, when Gord’s name was
excluded from the credits, leading us to believe that none of his scenes had
made the final cut.
I had a similar experience in  when another friend, Larry Pynn,
a reporter with the Vancouver Sun, signed on as an extra for the Michael
Chapman fantasy Clan of the Cave Bear, then filming on Bowen Island. At the
film’s Vancouver debut, it seemed that most of the audience consisted of
extras like Larry. To this day, Larry still searches for himself on the screen –
midway through the film, at the edge of the frame of a busy scene in which
hundreds of extras adorned in animal skins arrive for a gathering of the
clans. I found him as hard to recognize as Gord had been in his monster cos-
tume. The credits, at least, verified Larry’s participation.

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The BC film industry was in those days, to me and my friends at least,

a lark, nothing we were prepared to take seriously. Even when, as a student at
Simon Fraser University, I began to study the Canadian film industry during
the free-trade debates of the late s, I had little regard for what was hap-
pening all around me. Filmmaking in British Columbia was not real cinema,
because the province was little more than a Hollywood back lot, and because
the films shot in British Columbia were almost always set somewhere else.
The province’s role seemed no more integral to these films than Gord and
Larry had been to theirs. To my mind, the products of what had come to be
called Hollywood North lacked the integrity of those rare home-grown films
like Phillip Borsos’s The Grey Fox or Sandy Wilson’s My American Cousin,
films that were conceived, shot, and set in British Columbia. I was convinced
that, for the most part, real cinema took place elsewhere.
But the film industry in British Columbia has become harder and harder
to ignore. It has grown steadily, producing more films and television pro-
grams, and spending more money in the province each year. Some years have
been leaner than others, certainly, but Hollywood’s anticipated desertion of
British Columbia has never materialized. In fact, during the busy summer
months, often enough film crews and studio space aren’t available to satisfy
Hollywood’s demands. If anything, Hollywood’s presence in British Colum-
bia has become further entrenched in recent years as major Hollywood stu-
dios establish local production facilities. At the same time, a small indigenous
industry has emerged, gaining notice and occasionally awards at film festivals
throughout Canada and internationally.
British Columbia has become in the span of twenty-five years one of the
largest centres of film and television production in North America. Compared
to just  productions and $ million in direct spending in , the film
and television industries spent $. billion on  productions – including
fifty-six feature films – in British Columbia in  (BC Film Commission
b). These numbers are significant not only to British Columbia. They
attest to the growing importance of regional and foreign location production
within the Canadian film industry. Every province in Canada has at least one
government office promoting film production, and within the provinces
there are regional and municipal film commissions seeking to attract loca-
tion activity to their areas.
At the same time, these numbers underscore the increasing internation-
alization of commercial film production by the major studios, a development

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California film workers have found threatening. Two Hollywood labour orga-
nizations – the Directors Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild –
commissioned a study that singled out British Columbia as a chief culprit in
luring film and television production away from southern California (Mon-
itor Company ). During the spring and summer of , California film
and television workers staged rallies in Burbank, Sacramento, and Holly-
wood, calling for action from the state legislature to stem so-called runaway
production (Movie, TV workers ).
A report commissioned by the International Trade Administration
(, ) of the US Department of Commerce estimated US$. billion in
direct expenditures were lost to runaway production in , although the
Directors Guild of Canada claimed the figure was closer to a still-substantial
US$. billion. The Film and Television Action Committee () said that
of the  percent of all US-developed film and television productions in 
made in foreign locations,  percent were made at least partly in Canada;
it accused Canada of trying to steal the film industry from the United States
(see also Magder and Burston , ). By October , a bill had been
introduced in Congress asking the US government to provide wage-based tax
credits for small to mid-size projects filmed in the United States (Garvey
a). In December , the Film and Television Action Committee and
the Screen Actors Guild filed a petition with the US Department of Com-
merce, asking Washington to impose penalties on film and television pro-
ductions shot in Canada (Garvey b).
Canadian film and television production has become a $. billion
industry, creating the equivalent of , full-time jobs annually. The
industry produces about forty Canadian feature-length films each year (Yaffe
). British Columbia occupies a distinct place within this industry, given
its relatively recent emergence as a production centre, its heavy reliance on
foreign service production, and its consequent modest contribution to
Canada’s stock of indigenous films and television programs. From  to
, for example, spending by foreign film and television producers
accounted for more than two-thirds of the industry’s economic activity
(BCFC b). As recently as , BC production represented just  percent
of Canadian production budgets, compared to Ontario’s  percent and
Quebec’s  percent (CFTPA , -).
British Columbia’s heavy reliance on foreign location production raises
an obvious question: What does it mean, in an age of global image flows

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and transnational audiovisual production, to speak of the British Columbia

film industry, an industry with clearer links to Hollywood than to Canada?
Besides being the geographical site of production, what relevance does this
place have to the dramatic cinema that is produced within its boundaries?
Such questions have been the source of some angst, as the opening para-
graphs of a front-page article in the Vancouver Sun attest: “It’s the old famil-
iar story. In the movie business, BC residents are the hewers of wood
and drawers of water for a seductive foreign culture – and Beautiful British
Columbia itself stands in for less beautiful foreign parts, usually in the
United States. The movie invasion of British Columbia by US producers
may be good for Canada’s economy, but what is it doing for our soul as a
nation? In the circumstances, the nickname ‘Hollywood North’ takes on
an ominously ironic ring” (Canadian culture? ). Where does British
Columbia fit within this cinema? Is it merely a convenient yet expendable
site of production? Or can it make a more integral claim to the cinema
made within its boundaries?
These questions arise from unstated assumptions about the nature of
cinema and the proper relationship between a cinema and its site of produc-
tion. These assumptions, which cast the BC film industry as some kind of
misfit, thwart serious evaluation of what kind of cinema it is and how we
might understand its relationship to place. The idea that British Columbia’s
feature film industry is a dis-placed cinema is written into the nicknaming of
Vancouver, the province’s centre of film production, as “Hollywood North”
or “Brollywood.” The New York Times has called Vancouver “The City That
Can Sub for All of America” (Elias ).

Cinema As National Cinema

If cinema is one of the media through which we imagine place, it must also
be acknowledged that place is one of the templates with which we imagine
cinema. Cinema, in other words, has commonly been analyzed as a medium
of expression specific to a geographically situated culture. And within cin-
ema’s taxonomy, privilege has been granted to national cultures. Even those
studies that foreground genre or auteur analyses frequently appeal to
national cultural contexts to explain specific characteristics of film texts.
Thus, we read about German expressionism, Soviet socialist realism, Italian
neo-realism, French impressionism and surrealism, and the American west-
ern (see Cook ; Bordwell and Thompson ; Turner ).

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Certainly it can be argued that context remains pertinent to the analysis

of both film industries and film texts. But what is less clear is how context
itself should be demarcated. Classifying cinema as national cinema can no
longer be assumed to be the most appropriate category of analysis for a body
of films produced within a given nation-state, nor can it be taken for granted
that all film industries are national industries. The nation is not the only
scale on which place can be imagined. The framing of cultural production
as national cultural production is called into question by transnational enter-
prise, by local or regional cultural workers, and by cultural producers whose
identity is not tied to geographic proximity. Thus, we can point to women’s
cinema, black cinema, and queer cinema as examples of filmmaking tra-
ditions emanating from communities that do not necessarily share a geo-
graphical locale.
Classification is an important issue because how we categorize cinema
informs how we talk about films, or whether we talk about them at all.
Critical categories, such as national cinemas, help to define cinema by assign-
ing the medium a particular social role, by establishing parameters of dis-
cussion, by including certain film texts, and by excluding others. Dissonant
elements, however, are then either suppressed or overlooked: “The problem
is that categories have a mythologizing and homogenizing function: they
perpetuate a logic of identity, a logic which dictates that the critic emphasize
elements (textual or extra-textual) of coherence, unity and wholeness”
(Stukator , ).
Andrew Higson () argues that there is no single, accepted discourse
of national cinema. National cinema can be defined in economic terms,
whereby the term “national cinema” embraces an entire domestic film indus-
try. National cinema discourse can also take a text-based, consumption-
based, or criticism-led approach, reducing national cinema to “quality art
cinema”: “In other words, very often the concept of national cinema is used
prescriptively rather than descriptively, citing what ought to be the national
cinema, rather than describing the actual cinematic experience of popular
audiences” (-). The process of identifying a national cinema, Higson
maintains, is an attempt to contain that cinema, to limit what it can mean
and, ultimately, produce ().
Peter Morris () offers a specific example of this problem in his
analysis of canon formation in Canadian film studies during the s and
s. A prevailing assumption of criticism in that period, Morris remarks,

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was that films in Canada should be discussed as products of a national cul-

ture. Morris invokes two Claude Jutra films: Mon Oncle Antoine (), which
has been thoroughly analyzed and is a staple of film studies courses; and À
tout prendre (), which remains marginal to Canadian cinema study.
While both are generally acknowledged to be excellent films, they are distin-
guished by their treatment of identity. Mon Oncle Antoine deals with French-
English relations, and therefore fits comfortably within the “two solitudes”
discourse of Canadian film scholarship. À tout prendre is a very personal and
autobiographical film, and thus falls beyond the thematic boundaries of
Canadian national cinema. Morris argues that the nationalist orientation of
s criticism “effectively negated any meaningful debate about how a
‘national’ cinema might be defined” (-).1
For Bart Testa (), Canadian film scholarship has been constrained
by a “social-reflection thesis,” a legacy he traces to John Grierson, who insti-
tutionalized this thesis in the National Film Board of Canada: “Canadian
critics (and governments too) have repeatedly declared that there should be
‘distinctly’ Canadian movies. The distinction would be that these movies
would ‘reflect’ Canadian social realities, and so they would somehow have to
be ‘realistic.’ This social-reflecting activity, in turn, would constitute Cana-
dian identity. It is this social-reflection prescription that provides unity to
critical debates and to Canadian cinema” (). Testa remarks a “consensual
preoccupation” among Canadian film scholars that “movies should serve
a high moral purpose” – nation-building, the articulation of a national cul-
ture – as opposed to being, for instance, sources of entertainment.
Organizers of an extensive Canadian cinema retrospective at the Centre
Georges Pompidou in Paris in  struggled over how to categorize the
disparate assortment of  films they chose to screen. The cumbersome
title of the exhibition – Les Cinémas du Canada: Québec, Ontario, Prairies, côte
Ouest, Atlantique – acknowledged plurality at the same as it embedded Cana-
da’s national cinema in the country’s diverse regions.2 The catalogue that
accompanied the retrospective devoted chapters to Quebec and “les autres
provinces” as well as to documentary, feminist, experimental, and IMAX
films (Garel and Pâquet ). In his introduction to the catalogue, Sylvain
Garel (, ) acknowledges that “ces cinématographies abordent des
thèmes et développent des styles très différents, à tel point qu’il aurait été
plus logique d’intituler cette rétrospective et cet ouvrage «Les cinémas du
Québec et du Canada».” However, “ce titre a dû être abandonné à cause de

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problèmes économico-politiques résultant de l’interminable et complexe

débat constitutionnel canadien.”3
Michael Dorland (, ) proposes that the challenge to scholars of
filmmaking in Canada is “the utter heterogeneity of its cinema.” Besides its
various genres – documentary, experimental, animation, features, shorts –
Canada offers distinct production traditions emanating from an array of
institutional sites. “Given the complex heterogeneity of Canadian cinema,
where was the analyst to actually ‘locate’ it?” he asks (). Canadian film schol-
arship has typically treated Canadian cinema’s heterogeneity “as problems to
be disposed of,” Dorland argues, rather than as “starting points for a prob-
lematic of historiographical method.” The concept of national cinema has
conveniently allowed scholars to provide a unified frame for a fragmented
Canadian cinema (-). By reducing cinema in Canada to national cinema,
and thereby glossing over the difficulties of sharing the North American con-
tinent with the United States, English-Canadian film critics, in Dorland’s
view, have tried to play a role in forging a national culture ().
Conventional analyses of cinema as national cinema also ignore or sup-
press what has become an increasingly prominent feature of contemporary
film. The transnationalization of Hollywood’s film production sector, which
resulted from the Hollywood majors abandoning the factory-like studio sys-
tem of production in the postwar period, further complicates the relation-
ship between cinema and place. What Toby Miller (, ) refers to as “the
new international division of cultural labor” means that local film industries
around the world include both indigenous filmmaking and runaway pro-
duction conceived and financed by, typically, American film companies. In
places like British Columbia, the hybrid motion picture industry is devoted
primarily to foreign location production. Over time, local film workers have
increasingly implicated themselves in the production of Hollywood films and
television programs by assuming creative roles as performers, directors of
photography, assistant directors, and occasionally as directors. When Steven
Spielberg shot portions of Schindler’s List () in Poland, for example,
Polish nationals Janusz Kamiński (director of photography), Allan Starski
(set designer), and Ewa Braun (costumes) occupied key creative positions
(Wertenstein ).
John Hill (b) suggests that if specific cinemas are contested cate-
gories, so is the category of cinema itself. In other words, when we talk about
“cinema,” what exactly are we talking about? A cinema comprises three main

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components: the structures of film production, the textual characteristics of

film, and the distribution and exhibition of films. These three components
have permitted film scholars to make analytical distinctions between, for
example, cinema in Europe and European cinema, a distinction that may
hide as much as it reveals about cinema’s sense of place. Given Hollywood’s
dominance of European cinema screens and the major studios’ investment
in runaway production, Hill suggests that “it could be possible for there to be
a successful European film industry which is nonetheless neither making nor
showing European films” (-).
Ireland is one such example: “Since the s, the state’s support for film
production has usually been limited to addressing problems of unemploy-
ment through encouraging foreign capital to invest in films in Ireland”
(Rockett , ). Kevin Rockett points out that well-known “Irish” films
like My Left Foot (), The Field (), The Commitments (), The Play-
boys (), and Far and Away () were produced largely with British and
American money. The Irish government established a film office in Los
Angeles in  for the purpose of promoting Ireland as a location for run-
away production (Dwyer ).
Hill (a, ) argues that Hollywood is not simply a parallel “other” that
can be ignored in the analysis of indigenous cinemas. He suggests that it may
be useful to think of Hollywood less as a national industry than as a global
cinema, which Europeans – and Canadians – have both helped to create and
have integrated into their own popular culture.4 For example, when Irish
filmmakers began to construct their own “cinematic Ireland” in the wake
of numerous Hollywood images of their country, they were compelled to
develop a film form better suited to the films’ thematic preoccupations, con-
stituting “an attempt to re-imagine Ireland” (McLoone , ).
Stephen Crofts (, ) lists seven varieties of national cinema in an
attempt to acknowledge that there is a wider range of cinemas than is typi-
cally signified by that term: “Not only do regional and diasporic cinema pro-
duction challenge notions of national cinemas as would-be autonomous
national businesses. So, too, Hollywood’s domination of world film markets
renders most national cinemas profoundly unstable market entities, margin-
alized in most domestic and all export markets, and thus readily susceptible,
inter alia, to projected appropriations of their indigenous cultural mean-
ings.” One of the seven varieties Crofts identifies is regional/ethnic cinema,
a category that includes, for example, Catalan, Québécois, Welsh, Aboriginal,

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Maori, native American, Chicano, and Afro-American filmmaking. Unfortu-

nately, Crofts does not elaborate on the particular sense of “national” these
cinemas evoke.
In a similar vein, Tom O’Regan opens up the category of national cin-
ema analysis about as far as it will go without rendering it altogether mean-
ingless. For O’Regan (, ), a national cinema is “a film milieu made up
of antagonistic, complementary and simply adjacent elements, which are to
be made sense of in their own terms.” This accounts not only for the var-
ied motivations of local filmmakers, but also for the presence in the same
milieu of the transnational commercial film industry.
If Crofts and O’Regan call into question the way national cinemas are
conceived and analyzed, they stop short of rejecting the frame altogether.
They maintain the hegemony of the national, a classification that cannot
account for the possibility that certain sub-national jurisdictions may con-
stitute cinemas obeying alternative spatio-temporal dynamics, with distinct
histories, laws, institutions, traditions, and funding mechanisms, cinemas
integrated within industrial networks operating both intra- and internation-
ally. What such criticism points to, instead, is a category crisis. Too many
cinemas today defy the national category, because the production commu-
nity is not a national community in any sense of the term, or because nations
have too many cinemas for the term to have meaning, or because filmmak-
ing in any one nation is increasingly intertwined with transnational networks
of finance, production, distribution, and exhibition.
The film industry in British Columbia certainly cannot be understood
within the national cinema frame. It doesn’t fit. If the idea, proposed by Tom
O’Regan, is to make sense of particular cinemas “in their own terms,” then
it is necessary to set aside prefabricated conceptual frameworks, such as
“national cinema,” and allow the characteristics of these cinemas to establish
their own terms of understanding. That is what this book sets out to do.

Cinema and Globalization

This category crisis also calls into question conventional understandings of
“place,” the physical and social environment in which film and television
production occurs, and the relationship between filmmaking and its site of
production. The framing of cinema as national cinema is particularly vul-
nerable in an era of globalization.
Scholars who have engaged with the phenomenon of globalization from

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a number of disciplinary perspectives maintain that globalization has recon-

figured our senses of space and place. They underline, further, the significant
role the mass media play in the complex process of how we imagine and
construct ideas of place, as well as the related notions of community, culture,
society, nation, and identity. Far from rendering place irrelevant or inconse-
quential, however, such scholarship encourages a radical reconceptualization
of place in the context of intensified global social relations. This reconceptu-
alization implicates culture as well as place: “Globalization pulls cultures
in different, contradictory, and often conflictual ways. It is about the ‘de-
territorialization’ of culture, but it also involves cultural ‘re-territorialization.’
It is about the increasing mobility of culture, but also about new cultural
fixities” (Robins , ).
The contemporary world is characterized by the compression of time
and space. Social relations extend further than ever before, with greater fre-
quency, immediacy, and facility. The term “globalization” refers to the in-
creased mobility of people, capital, commodities, information, and images
associated with the postindustrial stage of capitalism, the development of
increasingly rapid and far-ranging communication and transportation tech-
nologies, and people’s improved access to these technologies. Globalization
has increased and facilitated intercultural contact across an array of social
sites, from the workplace to the supermarket, from the bus stop to the living
room.5
The term “globalization” is unfortunate because it suggests that all
significant social relations now occur on a global scale. What the term more
properly refers to, however, is an intensified interrelation of social activity
on local and global scales, rather than their opposition (Massey and Jess
, ). Rob Wilson (, ) applies the more useful term “global/local
interface.” Doreen Massey (, ) describes this interface as follows: “Each
geographical ‘place’ in the world is being realigned in relation to the new
global realities, their roles within the wider whole are being reassigned, their
boundaries dissolve as they are increasingly crossed by everything from
investment flows, to cultural influences, to satellite TV networks.” She adds
that the social relations that constitute a given locality increasingly ex-
tend beyond that locality’s borders, no longer contained within any given
place ().
Of course, international migration is not new, nor is the mobility of
capital or the global circulation of cultural products. What is new about

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globalization is its intensity: the expanded reach and the immediacy of con-
temporary social relations. Migration, whether regional, intranational, or
international, voluntary or forced, has become a more common experience.
Russell King (, ) notes that few people in the Western world today live
their entire lives in the same place. King remarks a trend to an increasing
diversity of migrant source countries and a change in the push and pull
factors of migration. Push pressures in developing countries are increasing,
as poverty, overcrowding, political instability, and environmental degrada-
tion reach intolerable levels, and people have acquired at least some knowl-
edge of living conditions in the industrialized world. As a consequence,
migrants from the margins have moved to the centres of economic and polit-
ical power. At the same time, pull pressures have changed. The decline in
manufacturing has reduced the need for traditional migrant labourers, while
the growth of the service sector has increased the demand for highly skilled
workers, resulting in what King calls “a new breed of executive nomads who,
whilst quantitatively much less important than the mass labour migrations
of the past, nevertheless wield enormous influence over the functioning of
the global economy” (-).
The increased mobility of capital, of course, is not unrelated to the issue
of migration. Corporations are becoming transnational. They are less rooted
to their “home” territories than ever before, seeking greater productivity and
improved access to international markets wherever these advantages can be
found. In the economic realm, David Morley and Kevin Robins (, )
insist that globalization organizes production and markets on a world scale.
Nowhere has capital been more successful at penetrating world markets than
in the cultural sphere. Morley and Robins argue that two key aspects of the
new spatial dynamics of globalization are, first, technological and market
shifts leading to the emergence of “global image industries,” and, second,
the development of local audiovisual production and distribution networks
(-). The authors refer to a “new media order” in which the overriding logic
of corporations is to get their product to the largest possible number of
consumers ().
But if, as Stuart Hall (, ) notes, satellite television is the epitome
of transnational forms of mass communication, “the most profound cultural
revolution has come about as a consequence of the margins coming into
representation.” He argues that within the global mediascape, story tellers
and image makers have won the space to assert their own particularity: “The

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emergence of new subjects, new genders, new ethnicities, new regions, new
communities, hitherto excluded from the major forms of cultural represen-
tation, unable to locate themselves except as decentered or subaltern, have
acquired through struggle, sometimes in very marginalized ways, the means
to speak for themselves for the first time” ().
Media images also serve as a reminder of how far our social relations
stretch, and the extent to which those relations are technologically mediated.
Morley and Robins (, ) observe: “The screen is a powerful metaphor
for our times: it symbolizes how we exist in the world, our contradictory
condition of engagement and disengagement.” The perpetual flows of peo-
ple, capital, goods, services, and images that characterize globalization carry
significant implications for how we experience and imagine place, how we
define community, and how we constitute identity. Globalization renders
actual borders more porous and metaphorical boundaries passé. But with all
this movement and intermixing, how can we retain a sense of local particu-
larity (Massey , )?
Globalization has not caused place to lose meaning so much as it has
intensified struggles over the meaning of place and thereby exposed the
extent to which “place” is a social construction. Places are vulnerable to rei-
fication, the perception that they are something other than products of
human activity. However, places have no natural boundaries, nor are they in
any way naturally confined in scale. If places have boundaries at all, these
boundaries have been drawn by social actors: “Geographers have long been
exercised by the problem of defining regions, and this question of ‘defini-
tion’ has almost always been reduced to the issue of drawing lines around a
place” (Massey , ).
As noted above, the various flows we associate with globalization are not
new. Globalization has, however, both increased the traffic – human, mater-
ial, electronic – across some borders, and reconfigured others. For example,
the free-trade agreement between Canada and the United States was an
attempt to facilitate trade across the border that divides the two countries.
Although the legal boundary remains, the meaning of the border has
changed, at least as far as trade relations are concerned. Satellite television,
on the other hand, ignores terrestrial boundaries altogether, and is confined
instead only by the satellite “footprints” that mark the limits of a satellite’s
transmission.
The heightened permeability of borders has been met, among some, by

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the desire for a more rooted sense of place. Scholars are in some disagree-
ment over whether relatively isolated, cohesive, and homogeneous commu-
nities ever existed, or if they did, how far back in history we need to go to
find them. Massey (, ) rejects inherited notions of a “singular, fixed and
static” identity of place by arguing that “‘places’ have for centuries been more
complex locations where numerous different, and frequently conflicting,
communities intersected.” She maintains that “it has for long been the excep-
tion rather than the rule that place could be simply equated with community
and by that means provide a stable basis for identity.” The identity of a place
“does not derive from some internalized history. It derives, in large part, pre-
cisely from the specificity of its interactions with ‘the outside’” ().
Although there is disagreement as to the genesis of the relationship
between space and place, there is consensus that place can no longer be
thought of as a simple “enclosure” for community, identity, or culture.
Gillian Rose (, ) notes that place has been a privileged component of
identity formation: “Identity is how we make sense of ourselves, and geogra-
phers, anthropologists and sociologists, among others, have argued that the
meanings given to a place may be so strong that they become a central part
of the identity of people experiencing them.” Places, and the experiences we
associate with places, both as individuals and as members of a group, inform
memory and our sense of belonging. This sense of belonging is critical to
understanding the relationship between identity and a particular locale.
“One way in which identity is connected to a particular place is by a feeling
that you belong to that place,” as Rose points out (). We might, therefore,
detect different senses of belonging between native residents of a place and
migrants. Such migrants as refugees and exiles, who have not moved of their
own free will, may feel little sense of appartenance in their new place of res-
idence (). Rose argues, “Increasing flows of ideas, commodities, informa-
tion and people are constantly challenging senses of place and identity which
perceive themselves as stable and fixed. The increasing interdependence
between places means that, for many academics at least, places must be seen
as having permeable boundaries across which things are always moving.
Identities, too, more and more often involve experiences of migration and
cultural changing and mixing” ().
Culture is another means by which identities of place are constructed
and sustained. Stuart Hall () argues that we tend to imagine cultures as
“placed” in two ways. First, we associate place with a specific location where

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social relationships have developed over time. Second, place offers cultures
“symbolic boundaries,” which separate those who belong from those who
don’t. At the same time, “there is a strong tendency to ‘landscape’ cultural
identities, to give them an imagined place or ‘home,’ whose characteristics
echo or mirror the characteristics of the identity in question” (). However,
Hall adds, “the ways in which culture, place and identity are imagined
and conceptualized are increasingly untenable in light of the historical and
contemporary evidence” ().
While one impact of globalization has been the diminution of “place” as
the basis for identity or culture, postmodern thinking and improved net-
works of transportation and communication facilitate the imagination of
communities based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or class.
Proximity, in other words, is not a necessary element of identity formation.
If culture and identity are not confined to a particular place, it follows that
any one place is not confined to a single culture or identity. This has precip-
itated localized struggles over immigration, language, urban development,
architecture, and foreign investment. Mike Featherstone (, ) remarks
that “cultural differences once maintained between places now exist within
them.” For example, “The unwillingness of migrants to passively inculcate
the dominant cultural mythology of the nation or locality raises issues of
multiculturalism and the fragmentation of identity.” Massey (, ) argues
that the way places are defined – by media reports, by local government poli-
cies, by development proposals – “can be important in issues varying from
battles over development and construction to questions of which social
groups have rights to live where.”
Identities of place are always the subject of dispute. Often they are
achieved through the construction of “Others,” which creates a sense of com-
munity insiders and outsiders (Rose , -). Or claims to a specific iden-
tity may be based on a particular reading of history: “In this sense, what is
being named or interpreted, is not just a space or place, but a place as it has
existed through time: what one might think of as an envelope of space-time”
(Jess and Massey , ). Such contestation occurs, not as an occasional
battle, but as a continual process on a range of geographical scales ().
The conventional container of identity and culture that has come under
greatest challenge from the reimagining of community has been the nation-
state. Questions of citizenship have been increasingly dissociated from ques-
tions of identity (Morley and Robins , ). The emergence of trading

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blocs in Europe, Asia, and North America, and the prevalence of both inter-
national and sub-national cultural networks, have undermined the primacy
of the nation-state in contemporary conceptions of community, identity, and
culture: “The nation-state, in effect, having been shaped into an ‘imagined
community’ of coherent, modern identity through warfare, religion, blood,
patriotic symbology, and language, is being undone by this fast imploding
heteroglossic interface of the global with the local: what we would here
diversely theorize as the global/local nexus” (Wilson and Dissanayake , ).

The Place of the Media in Society

The communications media have their own role to play in “dis-placing” and
“re-placing” community, identity, and culture, given that the media have his-
torically been important tools in constructing accepted notions of commu-
nity on both symbolic and material levels. To be more precise, five specific
roles can be ascribed to the media in how we imagine community: first, they
are the media of encounter, putting us in touch with one another via mail,
telephone, e-mail, or fax; second, they are the media of governance, enabling
the central administration of vast spaces and dispersed places; third, the
media represent community by depicting actuality and by creating fictional-
ized “sociological landscapes”; fourth, the media construct communities of
audiences, based on diverse criteria ranging from physical proximity to
shared tastes in popular music; and fifth, they create rituals through which
readers and spectators imagine themselves as part of a communal audience.
While face-to-face interaction – on the street, in the park, at work, at
school, at public meetings, at the corner store – remains central to social rela-
tions in even the most globalized of environments, proximity no longer
binds us to community. Communications technologies like the cellular tele-
phone, fax machine, and personal computer bind social spaces and enable
people to maintain regular and frequent contact. This is particularly so as
these technologies have become more accessible in terms of cost, ease of use,
and availability, and as these media have entered the private sphere of the
home. The instantaneousness with which technologically mediated conver-
sations can be held approximates face-to-face communication. As the boost-
ers of the digital age delight in telling us (e.g., Negroponte ), such media
enable us to maintain social relations over great distances, and their increas-
ing sophistication minimizes the obstacles implied by physical separation.
Similarly, as Harold Innis argued, communications media enable the

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centralized governance of a political community on the scale of the modern

nation-state, and the centralized administration of a transnational corpora-
tion of intercontinental range. Both national governance and global capi-
talism require efficient means of communication to establish a coherent
agenda, disseminate instructions and information, monitor the activities of
remote departments, and receive reports from local managers in the field.
This is a relationship of power in which an authoritative body exercises con-
trol over social space and the social order (see Drache , xlv-xlvi).
The third role the media play in how we imagine community is through
representation. They create what Benedict Anderson (, -) calls a
“sociological landscape” or “socioscape” in which their narratives are set.
As Anderson’s terminology indicates, these settings are both peopled and
bounded. If, historically, the eighteenth-century novel and newspaper taught
people to imagine community on the scale of the nation, contemporary
socioscapes present us with communities that are imagined in any number
of ways. The population of these settings and the location of their bound-
aries either reinforce conventional notions of community or propose new
social horizons.
In addition to representing communities, the media also construct them
out of audiences and markets. The newspaper provides a particularly good
example, in that newspapers are designed to address various kinds of com-
munity. They may serve a community of geographical proximity, such as
the Vancouver Sun on a metropolitan scale and the East Ender on a neigh-
bourhood scale. They may serve a particular community contained within
a locale, such as Le Soleil for Vancouver’s francophone community, or Sing
Tao for Vancouver’s Chinese community. Or they might serve a community
bound by a common interest in computers (Vancouver Computes), cinema
(Reel West), environmental issues (B.C. Environmental Report), business
(Equity), or alternative music (Loop). All of these communities are plural and
can therefore be further distinguished; most subscribers to Vancouver’s two
daily newspapers will be Vancouver residents, but they can probably be dif-
ferentiated on the basis of various demographic criteria. This, of course, is
how newspapers operate as commercial enterprises: they assemble audiences
to sell to advertisers (Smythe , -). Federal funding mechanisms for
broadcasting and film are good examples of how the Canadian state has
attempted to use media to construct an imagined community on a national
scale.

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Finally, the media produce widely shared rituals of readership and spec-
tatorship. When we sit down to watch the six o’clock news, we can imagine
millions of others doing the same thing at the same time, even if the news
they are watching is on another channel. Similarly, when we sit down to read
the newspaper over morning coffee, we can imagine ourselves as a commu-
nity of newspaper readers, even if, again, we are not all reading the same
paper. These rituals take their most obvious form in cinema spectatorship, in
which a group of people gather to watch a film, and thus literally form
an audience as community, if only for a couple of hours (Shohat and Stam
, -).
As a medium of representation, cinema, specifically, offers us pictures
of our physical and social world, showing us where we live, with whom we
share community, and from whom we are different. Cinema offers us depic-
tions of history, stories that explain to us how we got here and why our com-
munity is the way it is. When we participate in its production, cinema brings
us together as cultural workers, people who participate in the representation
of their social world, people who determine their own social horizons. If this
cultural work is devoted to depicting a given place, it also defines that place
by becoming one of the things cultural workers there do. Place, then, is not
simply rendered symbolically, but is embodied by a film’s characters and the
film workers themselves (see Relph ).
In light of the above, this book seeks to transcend “the national” as the
determining category in its analysis of the film industry in British Columbia.
It asserts that any given cinema is a social construction whose particular
definition is contingent upon a nexus of historical, economic, political, and
cultural forces. What the term “cinema” signifies in any specific context is the
result of choice, struggle, negotiation, and compromise, processes that are
often overlooked. These processes of definition privilege one particular film
form – such as animation, documentary, experimental, or feature – over
others, favour one form of governance – such as private enterprise or public
service – over others, and identify specific social roles for cinema – such
as entertainment, education, cultural enlightenment, or nation-building.
As a socially constructed institution, a given cinema is defined across
a number of sites. I have identified four that have shaped in fundamental
ways the feature film industry in British Columbia: provincial film history,
the economic structure of the commercial cinema, federal and provincial
film policy, and film practice. Each of these is a site of the production of

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meaning, creating particular understandings of cinema and place, and I

approach each differently.
It is important to clarify one matter from the outset. While, in popular
discourse, the term “film industry” typically refers to all forms of audiovisual
production, and while the convergence of the film and television industries
prompts some reflection on conventional analytical borders between these
media, I want to maintain a distinction between film and television in this
book. Film and television remain distinct industries in Canada from the
perspective of their histories, their regulatory environments, and their fund-
ing mechanisms. These three areas are especially pertinent to this study. The
fact, for example, that television exhibition is regulated through Canadian-
content quotas renders television a far more inclusive medium than cinema.
This theme of inclusion/exclusion from the film industry is a key element
of both the film industry in British Columbia and this book. Similarly, the
fact that the television industry in Canada is governed by national broad-
casters (such as CBC, CTV, and Global) distinguishes it structurally from the
regional orientation of feature film production. Again, the regional aspect
of film production is central to this study.
Chapter  describes the history of filmmaking in British Columbia from
the late s to the early s. Drawing on both primary and secondary
sources, this history reveals that the defining characteristics of British
Columbia’s feature film industry today have been in place for over  years.
These characteristics – an emphasis on foreign location production, provin-
cial government intervention, an industrial conception of cinema – only
became decisive advantages to British Columbia when the commercial film
industry based in Hollywood began to externalize production in the postwar
period. Besides documenting the early history of film production in the
province, this chapter sketches the context out of which British Columbia’s
feature film industry emerged in the s, and establishes a sense of con-
tinuity between the history of filmmaking in the province and British
Columbia’s contemporary cinema. I argue that British Columbia’s historical
inheritance is a perception of cinema as a medium, not of cultural expres-
sion, but of regional industrial development.
Chapter  builds on this theme by applying a political-economic analy-
sis to the feature film industry. All film production is governed to some ex-
tent by economic factors. Film is both a capital-intensive and labour-intensive
medium, and thus even the most modest film project demands some form of

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funding, whether in the form of investment, loan, subsidy, or barter. Feature

film, as cinema’s predominant commercial form, is especially implicated by
the transnational industry that organizes cinema as a form of commodity
production. Hollywood’s dominance of this industry has had a profound
influence on normalizing particular forms of cinema and thus on the circu-
lation and projection of individual movies. As Albert Moran (, -)
writes, “With the increasing transnationalization of film production, of
motion picture financing, the articulation of a long chain of distribution
outlets and their domination by the [Hollywood] majors, and the growth of
independent producers who themselves frequently act as brokers between
filmmakers and the principal distributors, the system now exists whereby
national film making is, through a series of commercial linkages, also a part
of Hollywood.” When it opted to develop a feature film industry in the s,
British Columbia mobilized a distinctly industrial strategy in which, to sup-
port Moran’s contention, British Columbia’s cinema became part of Holly-
wood. Chapter  argues that the opportunity to develop a feature cinema in
British Columbia was a product of both national and international factors:
British Columbia’s exclusion from Canada’s national cinema, concentrated
in Ontario and Quebec; and British Columbia’s inclusion in Hollywood’s
transnational audiovisual production.
Chapter  employs political history and social discourse analysis to assess
the policy initiatives undertaken by the BC government since the s to
develop a feature film industry. The policy process establishes guidelines, reg-
ulatory instruments, funding vehicles, and institutions that become integral
to film production by directing resources in certain directions with identifi-
able aims. More specifically, policy also stakes out the degree of state in-
tervention a government chooses to exercise in the regulation of a cultural
practice. Policy discourse constructs a privileged notion of what cinema is,
and delineates film production in particular ways. Discourse can be defined
as “an area in which knowledge is produced and operates, both openly and
in a less than overt way. It fixes norms, elaborates criteria, and hence makes
it possible to speak of and treat a given problem at a particular time” (Miller
, xiv). Social discourse analysis situates discourse within the broad
framework of society and culture, emphasizing “the relationships between
discourse and social structures” (Van Dijk , ). The chapter demon-
strates that the economic opportunity represented by foreign location pro-
duction was well suited to Victoria’s industrial perception of cinema and its

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long-term objective of expanding and diversifying the province’s recession-

prone, resource-based economy.
Any attempt to conceptualize the relationship between cinema and place
in the context of an analysis of British Columbia’s feature film industry
would be incomplete without reference to the films themselves. Chapter 
considers a sampling of feature films produced in British Columbia since the
late s. The method of textual analysis employed here is governed by the
question of how the films depict British Columbia, and how these depictions
speak to the province’s sense of place. While foreign service productions
almost always appropriate British Columbia within “America,” denying the
province its sociohistorical particularity, a number of British Columbia’s
indigenous films reassert the region’s distinctiveness.
To my knowledge, very little analysis in film studies has been devoted to
the implications of location filming for the rapport between story and set-
ting, and what little there is foregrounds aesthetic rather than political or
cultural concerns. If locations are mentioned at all, they are most commonly
treated within larger discussions of mise en scène (e.g., Giannetti ).
Charles Affron and Mirella Joan Affron () have gone some distance in
rescuing the study of set design from a general neglect within film studies,
and they include examples of locations within their larger analysis of the
degrees of intensity with which film sets establish time, place, and mood. Yet
even they treat locations as simply another type of film set. In a too-brief
article, Bernard Nietschmann () argues that geography should matter
in film production, but too often does not. In films shot on location,
Nietschmann insists, setting is reduced to background, contributing nothing
to the content of the film – “all is context, not content” – and suppressing
the meaning and power of place (). Locations are thereby rendered irrele-
vant: “When a place is shown or seen as just a location for a story or as but
pretty scenery, there is a dislocation between people and nature, between
image and experience, between the screen and geography, and between the
director and the audience” ().
Chapter , finally, concludes that British Columbia is particularly well
suited to what Doreen Massey () has termed a “global sense of place,”
which conceives of place as a meeting ground or intersection – for interna-
tional flows of people, capital, commodities, and images – rather than as a
clearly bounded cultural enclosure. Such a sense of place is critical to under-
standing the BC film industry, which is itself built upon a complex interface

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between transnational and regional/local regimes of production. In this way,

the film industry in British Columbia can be seen as very much a cinema of
its time and place.
Together, these chapters tell the story of the rapid rise of the film indus-
try in British Columbia, and they position this industry as both a model for
commercial film production in the twenty-first century and as an industry
whose basic characteristics have deep roots in a province that has always per-
ceived cinema as, first and foremost, a medium of regional industrial devel-
opment. If this book treats British Columbia as a unique case in many
respects, I aim nonetheless to demonstrate that the film industry in British
Columbia is part of a growing and widespread phenomenon in which cine-
mas around the world – and outside Quebec and Ontario within Canada –
are based predominantly on location service production. In so doing, I seek
to contribute to film studies debates over the category of national cinema,
the framing of cinema as industry, and the relationship between cinema and
place, regardless of where in the world these debates occur.

Cinema in the Age of Globalization 